A pack of naked hot dog people, attacking a lone male camper in the woods? Shiny long sausages, tackling him to the ground? You don’t have to be Freudian to see that this obviously is a phallic nightmare. In fact, the obviousness of that latent subtext is so much in the foreground, that it may even occlude the overt message here: the ad’s “narrative” is suggesting that you should not attempt to eat a whole “pack” of “dogs” when you go camping, else they will get their revenge on you. But if you do…Tums can shield and protect you from the heartburn pain.

The return of the repressed is a kind of acid reflux — you ate something you should not have, and it has come back to haunt you. What makes all this uncanny is that the symbolism of the “dog” is literalized, in the way the commercial depicts this food as animal. The dogs “bark at the moon” in the stunning opening shot, where a crouching nude body stands in contrast to an unusually large full moon, with all the sexual repression latent in the way it’s showing his “buns.” This is the stuff of not only Sigmund Freud, but also werewolf literature, and not acid reflux remedies…but in the magic system of advertising, all commercial products — from foods (Pillsbury Doughboy) to batteries (Energizer Bunny) — can be living creatures, like something possessed with the power they want you to believe the product has… akin to something supernatural. This is what is meant by commodity fetishism: attributing supernatural agency to consumer goods, and reifying the systems of production that can magically solve all your everyday problems.

But unlike the usual supernaturalization of product spokesmen (like we get with many other medications, like the “gut man” for Xifaxan — here’s a good commercial example), Tums doesn’t give us some magical walking “tummy”. Instead the disturbing creatures are foods that are aggressive and hostile and must be vanquished. The Hot Dog commercial cited above is but one of a series of “Food Fight” advertisements from Tums antacid that treat foods as large (clearly costumed) ambulatory creatures. Other ads show headless dead chickens, belligerent tacos, bullish T-Bones, and feisty little Italian meatballs. In every case, consumers must defend themselves from food that attacks them, and the tablets of Tums are framed as a kind of magical shield. The man in the Hot Dog commercial literally holds a “torch” in one hand and the tiny Tums Smoothies package in the other before him, the way Van Helsing holds up a torch and a cross to keep a vampire at bay!

Product as magical shield.

The ad condenses its narrative so swiftly that there are some disjunctive cuts — in one shot, “when heartburn comes creeping up on you,” the camper is tackled and overtaken by the pack of dogs, who seem to scrabble over his groin; then a cut shows him on his feet, holding the Tums jar aloft to chase them away. As we try to put together what just happened in the gap across the cut, which has all the suggestion of a kind of rape, if not murder — the advertisement switches into “scientific demonstration” mode to offer an explanation: through animation, it shows a dissolving tablet morphing into ghost-like magic tendrils that encircle the pain and sphinctering in on flames to extinguish them; the voiceover claims this is how the antacid “neutralizes stomach acid at its source.” Afterward, the medicated man blows out his hot dog stick-slash-torch, symbolically blowing out the “burn” of said stomach acid with a satisfied smile. Then the infamous “tum-ta-tum-tum” chorus closes out the ad. Importantly, this jingle is reminiscent of the Dragnet theme, associating the product in our cultural memory with a power akin to the “protectors” from law enforcement or the shield of the police, and, playing out over the image of the Tums logo and Smoothies product, it gets the final say.

The micro-ghosts of medicine at work.

While these Tums commercials are all about force, battle and aggression, they are uniformly framed as “defensive” actions, projecting the conservative impulse to “protect” ourselves from a threat. Often in ads, these threats are associated with abstractly gendered, sexual tensions — from the meatballs and steaks that interrupt men on a date, challenging their masculinity, to the virtual gang rape of a man by ambulatory phalluses while alone in the woods. (It is interesting to contrast this against the Tums Taco advert, where the less phallic, more yonic, Taco tackles women — until one picks up a guitar and beats the Mexican entree, ending in a liberated, libidinal Mariachi dance).

These commercials are depicting “monster battles” and the more one thinks about the way they really are treating food as limbless, eyeless, headless creatures the more nightmarish they might become. But what they are really doing is representing these edible Others as containable threats, for they are human, but “less than human.” This manages to counterbalance the weirdness of monstrous bodies against the realm of comedy, resulting in an unsettling but chuckle-worthy sense of uncanniness. (Contributing to the unsettled nature of this is our repressed awareness that what we eat is also something that once lived — other animals, who once lived and breathed just like us — organic forms whose bodies have been sacrificed and repurposed into objects for our consumption (and then in these ads, monstrously reborn all over again as part-human, part-entree hybirds). The humor is enacted by virtue of excessive and ludicrous imagery, the mode of parody in the Dragnet and Dracula references, and even the babytalk inherent to the product’s naming: Tums “Smoothies.” A “smoothie” is typically an organic fruit drink, not a chemical heartburn remedy, so this over-the-counter product still aligns itself with consumerism by virtue of naming its medicine as a kind of comfort food. And the term “tum” (or “tummy”) is clearly a childish way of saying “stomach.” This reassurance is regressive: it’ll all be okay in your tum-ta-tum-tum, after all, poor child-adult. Just pop this chewable pill….

In the end we are assured by the domestic comedy, and the restoration of these animistic beliefs from childhood, that these supernatural agents are harmless and that this is all just in good fun. Reassurances often take the structure of psychological disavowal when they circulate in advertising. This dreamwork logic disavows, occludes, and obfuscates the very real issue at the root of it all: that consumerism itself is often to blame for all this ulcerating acidity in the first place, and that heartburn medicine offers a “quick fix” mostly so that you can continue to over-indulge. These comical narratives are not just stories about putting the acid reflux in remission, but are stories about the power of the consumer product to repress guilt over unconscious desire, in order that we might indulge our fantasies and consume all over again, even when we consciously know that what we are doing might be harmful and “come back to haunt us” later. They perfectly embody the popular uncanny.

One of the first big budget TV commercials to air during this year’s Super Bowl programming was the “Nearly Double” advertisement for the Ford Fusion Hybrid, starring Rob Riggle & James Franco, which claims to “make history” by airing two commercials back-to-back, or following up the first commercial with a second one that is “double the length, double the awesomeness”:

It’s a pretty good ad, employing familiar comedic actors and over-the-top theatrics to celebrate a new vehicle that is both economically sound (with “nearly double” the fuel economy) and environmentally friendly (as a hybrid fuel system). It also is very self-congratulatory, in the way that it highlights Ford’s double-investment in what everyone knows is very expensive advertising space, claiming to “make history.”

But there’s nothing historical here, really. Over the history of advertising, many commercials have aired twice, whether back to back, or episodically throughout a time block. It’s not uncommon for ads to run consecutively to fill a time block (e.g., two 15-second ads after each other to fill a 30-second slot) or a monthly quota; sometimes infomercials will repeat over and over again after midnight till the sun rises, filling time with cheap ad space. The ad purports to be two commercials, but it’s really a “piggyback” ad, and relies on its integration of content for the “second” commercial to really make sense.

The ad may be trying to sneak in a claim that the car is the first to “nearly double” the fuel economy, but it doesn’t actually say that. No, what is (or may be) historical here is that this is a commercial that REMAKES ITSELF IMMEDIATELY. It is an example of what I call “doublement” — an exhibition of media’s “uncanny” capacity to mechanically “double” itself with spectacular results.

The commercial is rife with claims and references to the fantastic. We’re told it is “no ordinary commercial” with “double the…awesomeness” of other ads, and it takes great pains to call attention by framing itself as an “event” more than a product announcement (i.e., a pseudo-event, which all superbowl commercials seem to be anymore). This ad, Riggle assures us, “has never been done before…in the history of commercials.” It has all the hoopla of a magic act — which it seems to become when Riggle returns in the commercial’s final salvo, soaring in the pilot’s seat of a jet airplane.

There is a lot of “double-talk” in this ad, actually. The assertion that this “has never been done before…in the history of commercials” is kind of the ad’s overarching dumb joke, because the ad is all about repetition: of “doing again” what has been “done before.” It relies on the “fantastic” power of doubling — doublement — to replace the overtly “domestic” Riggle in Ad #1 with the more famous actor, James Franco, dressed to the nines, surrounded by opulence and introduced with a dramatic (cinematic) score. Riggle’s chirping pet is replaced in ad #2 with a tiger that towers over Franco on the sofa. In fact, the whole ad relies relies on the back-referencing cues (eg a sprinkler in Riggle’s neighborhood is substituted by tall fountains in Franco’s version; kids playing with sparklers in Riggle’s yard are replaced with fabulous dancers and sky high fireworks; Riggle sits on his roof and blows a dandelion, while Franco “planks” impossibly horizontal from a skyscraper window above a city skyline, blows a dandelion, and its florets “snow down” upon the Ford Fusion as it slaloms in the shining city streets. At the end of Riggle’s section, doves fly from around the car; in Franco’s, jet airplanes swoop down in the sky. But both sections end with the same logo: Ford “Go Further”.

Does going back to repeat one’s self really “go further” or does it spin in circles?

It’s all repetition, really — held together with a virtually identical script of dialogue. The text repeats; but the stylistics on the surface are changed, with the second version emphasizing the “magical” power of itself as a double.

Thus, the advertisement is meaningless except as a textual doppelganger: a clone of itself, with the second version merely highlighting the power of CINEMA TECHNOLOGY to magically construct fantasy, rather than really showing us anything fantastic about the car itself. The technology of film replaces the technology of hybrid automotives; the “magic” is the system of advertising, not the science of car fuel systems. At most, all Franco can really do is shout from above a gigantic sign that reads “NEARLY DOUBLE”. This is an television ad reduced to a billboard. An ad is an ad, and it can be nothing more than that.

Perhaps this is why a jet engine — an airplane — gets to have the last word in this ad, not a car.

Of course, the very model name of the Ford “Hybrid Fusion” lurks behind all of this: the ad is a hybrid ad — an original and its remake, fused into one. It is redundant to say “hybrid” and “fusion” back-to-back, just as the ad is a comedic act of redundancy.

The Onion’s AV Club ran a great list of “23 Ridiculous Horror Movies” called “Night of the Killer Lamp” back in 2007. It’s actually a great list of films that would make for a fun marathon night of creepy-kookie horror films. What it proves, too, is that a) the horror genre is rife with “uncanny” objects at the center of their narratives (e.g. possessed dolls, plants and animals that have human agency, inanimate objects that move of their own accord, etc.), and that, b) the uncanny is often funny…especially when it fails.

One of many on the list is Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive, which is hilarious but in my view also a very important film in the pantheon of the uncanny (see my essay in the book, The Films of Stephen King). For a quick example, here’s the soda machine scene, from youtube.

So how does it fail? Is a killer soda machine not scary? If not, what makes it inherently goofy?

I won’t go into a close reading of this particular scene. It’s easy enough to understand through the theory of the uncanny itself. One answer might be that the uncanny — like all fiction — requires a willing suspension of disbelief…but that the ideas here are so ludicrous that we are unwilling to do so. If our mental mastery remains in charge of our experience, keeping the “belief” in animistic actions at bay, then we invest no autonomous power or agency into the object.

In other words, we know they are puppets on a string. We must genuinely believe that the string has been cut when the puppet starts to dance in order to truly experience the uncanny.

Special effects are always attempting to cut that string. The low budget nature of these films (or simply their datedness, as effects have evolved) may prevent us from believing in their magic.

Even so, it may not be fair to entirely dismiss all the “killer lamp” films as simply “ridiculous.” There are moments in each of them — some more than others — where the uncanny can be experienced due mostly to the power of cinema technology to animate inanimate objects and thereby bring them to life. Hardcore realists might be too steeled up against the ludicrous to really suspend disbelief, but there remains something regressive about these films that might account for their sense of being ludicrous in the first place. They are aggressively regressive. They force us to engage in a childlike belief in the worlds they project. They work hard to resurrect our childish (or as Freud put it, “surmounted”) beliefs in a world where anything can potentially hold life and move on its own. Our laughter may very well be a defense mechanism against this return to our earlier beliefs — an attempt to affirm that our adult selves have surmounted them, in collective laughter.

Freud: “…a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and…there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.”

When I first saw this twisted comedic film, I laughed at its outrageousness. You might be horrified or you might guffaw. It speaks for itself in a mere five seconds. Here’s it is: 5SecondFilms’“Magic Show Volunteer” (2009):

After I recoiled from the unexpected in this “magic show,” I immediately wanted to share it with others. I had the “you’ve gotta see this” reaction that compels so many of us to share these sorts of things online in social media. I copied the link and was ready to press “send” on my twitter account. But then I realized something. It was a magic show skit. Hadn’t I seen something like this before?

And I had. Many of us have. These kinds of films, which are everywhere on the internet because so many people have access to the technology to make them now, are identical to the very first movies ever made. Here, for example, is a famous example from about 115 years ago, when the early “one reelers” were being exhibited to public amazement: George Melies’ “The Magician” (1898):

Just as early film makers were exploring the creative capacity of the medium, today millions are doing the same thing — with a range of success and failure — using the ubiquitous capacities of phone apps, tablets, webcams, camcorders and similar devices which can point, shoot, edit and share with an audience in a matter of minutes. I have one myself, and I’m playing around with it quite a bit, which is also leading me to start researching this stuff on youtube (subscribe to my channel) more and more. What I’m finding is that the most successful of them exploit editing and sound in order to trick the eye and confound expectations, which give them a foot in the cinema of the uncanny.

In writing about early cinema, film critic Tom Gunning termed this genre the “cinema of attractions” — film’s equivalent to the circus sideshow, where the spectacle is everything and the narrative is scant or completely unnecessary. Before roughly 1906, film had not yet converted over to the dominant narrative format that we know so well in most Hollywood films today, which continues to draw from 19th Century narrative structure. YouTube makes no such pretense (perhaps because when it got started, YouTube would limit postings to 5 minutes in length, which led to widespread sharing of quirky videos akin to America’s Funniest Home Videos — which, incidentally, just aired it’s 500th episode — more than anything else). The bulk of the experience of such shared videos cues its viewers in much the same way as the early cinema of attractions, especially in its reference to the “magic” of what we are shown.

In her essay, “You Tube: The New Cinema of Attractions,” critic Theresa Rizzo does a masterful job both situating such videos into the tradition of this genre, but also exploring what marks online video sharing as unique: “although YouTube clips arrest our attention and encourage us to gawk similarly through novelty and curiosity throughout the course of a day, they also invite us to respond and participate in a variety of ways.” Thus, instead of turning to your neighbor in the theater seats and saying “wow,” we can say “wow” (and much more) right back to the filmmakers in an online comment or foment our own viral marketing campaign through an international form of “word of mouth” advertising on facebook, twitter, and elsewhere. Such shared videos can also be remediated — transported into different media or even remixed. “The cinema of attractions is ultimately about acts of display, or exhibitionism rather than storytelling in a similar way remediation is all about showing off by being clever and creative. It is a self-conscious practice that points to the producer, itself and to the power of the medium.”

I am, of course, fascinated and enthralled by short cinema and all the online activity we see with such texts. I think there is a grand democratization of art happening right now, which is wonderful (despite my skepticism about much of it — see my essay “Mock Band: The Simulation of Artistic Processes” for more on that). But the main interest for me is the role of the uncanny in communicating “the power of the medium”…which often is figured as a technology with autonomous, supernatural agency. This power is interesting to read as a symptom of social or personal anxiety, and often deifies technology in ways intended to either disavow agency or sell products through commodity fetishism (e.g. consumer technology IS a commodity). Melies wasn’t selling anything but himself. His “camera” was a magic wand. Today, magic wands are camcorders in the hands of the masses, available to all — for a price — and if we want, we can “magically” edit our stories, our personal history, our record of events. This is a manifestation of the popular uncanny.

In the Five Second Film about “The Magic Show Volunteer” our spectacular laughter relies on the taboos that are encroached here, regarding violence against pregnant women. It is not so difficult to give a feminist critique to something so clearly gendered in its representation of power. The male magician, a staging of authority, literally appropriates the “uncanny” nature of organic childbirth (“popping” the belly in a horrific way (clearly a balloon is pricked) — almost as if the woman’s body was something artificial, like a doll — before ‘birthing’ the child from his mouth). This topsy-turvy figuration of “male birth” is a common trope in uncanny horror film (and reaches all the way back to Shelley’s Frankenstein). It is an aggressive fantasy that a Freudian might read as an Oedipal nightmare as much as a gross-out joke, with the “father figure” of the fanciful magician responsible for “disappearing” the child, swallowing it off screen and “magically” pulling the newborn from his throat on its umbilical tourniquet. All of this “magic” — the taboo male fantasy of the text — is performed by cinematic technology, and its placement in the cinema of attractions renders it safe, domestic…and perhaps far too easily reproduced and reinforced as a social message.

Or maybe it’s just funny, and we’re invited to laugh at the male fantasy it presents. Perhaps the gimmicky magic it offers up is mocked, and this is a parody of itself. I’m uncertain. That, too, is inherent to the uncanny.

The series of “House” party ads that Mike’s Hard Lemonade have started running are pretty effective and funny in the way that they domesticate tropes of the uncanny.

In my favorite, the host of the party answers the door bell, and a headless deer simply stands on the doorstep, breathing. The mounted head in the room behind him asks “Who is it?” because he can’t move his (dead) head to see who is at the door. The camera cuts back to a point-of-view shot from the party host, angle tilted down to show the standing, breathing, corpse. It’s like the body has come in search for its owner. The mounted head over his shoulder blinks , then asks in a normal-enough voice, just like any one of the guests: “Seriously, who is it?” The host stands just stands between them, puzzled. The commercial cuts to its end cap, a hand spilling a chilly malt beverage from a wet bottle into an icy glass: “Mike’s Lemonade: Always different, always refreshing.”

Like good flash fiction, the scenarios in these ads drive home the “always different” tagline in a way that suggests that the unexpected is omnipresent, always standing on the threshold right outside your doorway (and the entire series of ads are identical up until the doorbell rings). The use of the uncanny trope of the dismembered body part that acts on its own accord is the central motif of this particular ad) there are others in the series that use familiar icons of the horror and dark fantasy genre, like the scarecrow doing house calls, or the 30 foot woman who returns to pick up her lost giant shoe), but the talking mounted head and the ambulatory deer carcass are perhaps my favorite because they most clearly show that the uncanny is both in and out of the household — which is another way of saying that the unfamiliar is always already built into the familiar, and that the domestic space is inherently haunted by what it excludes by the artificial boundary line of property.

I also really like that the deer on the doorway is shown simply breathing. I have written earlier on this blog about “living, breathing death” (“the autonomous movement of fur”) and I can’t help but notice it here, too. The ad seems to suggest that the house party host is encountering the spirit of the game he’s bagged…and ends right on the edge of a horror movie revenge scenario. There is almost a rhetorical appeal here, manifested as a return of repressed guilt for hunting game — a theme that might suggest that the violence required for hunting for animal trophies is inhumane and not so easily forgotten.

But there is another, deeper element of this ad (and all of the “House” ads) that some viewers might not spot right away, if at all, which is really worth noting.

There are women in these ads, but we never see their heads. They are all legs (even, if not especially, in the 30 ft. woman spot). The blocking of the shots literally cuts off their heads, aligning them with the deer whose head is separated from its legs. By association, women are but trophies. This may very well be why the absurdist comedy undercuts the serious horror here, and why the uncertain “oh well” shrug off ending of the advertisement doesn’t follow through on the “revenge of the deer” scenario that it implies.

Of course, beer ads are notorious for the objectification of women, so this analysis really doesn’t say anything really new. The uncanny in advertising often masks the common and familiar by distracting viewers away from the ideologies it indulges. The lesson here is simply that Mike’s Lemonade ad is perhaps not so very “different,” after all.

On the Uncanny . . .

The factor of the repetition of the same thing will perhaps not appeal to everyone as a source of uncanny feeling. From what I have observed, this phenomenon does undoubtedly, subject to certain conditions and combined with certain circumstances, arouse an uncanny feeling, which, furthermore, recalls the sense of helplessness experienced in some dream-states.